QCA6174 on Asus Z170I Pro Gaming

[Per Östlund]

I could've sworn that the driver failed completely when it couldn't find 
firmware-5.bin, but when cold booting the machine I now see that it 
actually falls back to another firmware as you say. Anyway, looking at 
the ini file as you suggested told me that eeprom_ar6320_3p0_NFA344a.bin 
was the correct file. Replacing 
/lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board.bin with it made the wifi 
spring to life, and I get usable performance (~80 Mbit/s). Thanks a lot 
for the help!

/Per

On 2016-01-19 09:39, Michal Kazior wrote:
> On 18 January 2016 at 19:39, Per Östlund <perost86 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm trying to get the wifi on my Asus Z170I Pro Gaming to work, but haven't
>> had any luck so far.
>>
>> lspci says:
>> Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless
>> Network Adapter [168c:003e] (rev 32)
>> Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:86cd]
>>
>> I'm using the 4.4 kernel, on Arch Linux 64-bit (linux-4.4-3 package from
>> testing repo). Out of the box ath10k doesn't work at all, complaining that
>> it can't find firmware-5.bin. Copying firmware-4.bin to firmware-5.bin gets
>> me further, with dmesg saying this:
> Please, don't do that. It's pointless.
>
> ath10k has a fallback system. If it doesn't find firmware-5.bin it'll
> look for -4, -3, -2 as well. The message you see in the kernel log is
> just a side effect of how to kernel API works at this time.
>
>
>> [ 4237.917517] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: pci irq msi interrupts 1 irq_mode 0
>> reset_mode 0
>> [ 4238.139726] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
>> ath10k/cal-pci-0000:05:00.0.bin failed with error -2
>> [ 4238.139742] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
>> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin failed with error -2
>> [ 4238.139745] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: could not fetch firmware file
>> 'ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/firmware-5.bin': -2
>> [ 4238.202052] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
>> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin failed with error -2
>> [ 4240.318396] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: qca6174 hw3.2 (0x05030000,
>> 0x00340aff sub 1043:86cd) fw WLAN.RM.2.0-00180-QCARMSWPZ-1 fwapi 4 bdapi 1
>> htt-ver 3.26 wmi-op 4 htt-op 3 cal otp max-sta 32 raw 0 hwcrypto 1 features
>> wowlan,ignore-otp,no-4addr-pad
> You have the hw3.2. It is sensitive to board data files (board.bin /
> board-2.bin).
>
>
>> [ 4240.318399] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: debug 0 debugfs 1 tracing 0 dfs 0
>> testmode 0
>> [ 4243.317764] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: could not suspend target (-11)
>> [ 4243.378790] ath: EEPROM regdomain: 0x6c
>> [ 4243.378794] ath: EEPROM indicates we should expect a direct regpair map
>> [ 4243.378796] ath: Country alpha2 being used: 00
>> [ 4243.378797] ath: Regpair used: 0x6c
>> [ 4243.380678] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0 wlp5s0: renamed from wlan0
> Looks okay.
>
>
>> [ 4365.040838] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: pci irq msi interrupts 1 irq_mode 0
>> reset_mode 0
>> [ 4365.264862] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
>> ath10k/cal-pci-0000:05:00.0.bin failed with error -2
>> [ 4365.327022] ath10k_pci 0000:05:00.0: Direct firmware load for
>> ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin failed with error -2
> Looks like you reloaded the driver and nothing actually happened in
> between. Perhaps your syslog (or journald I suppose) filtered some
> messages?
>
>
>> The interface can't be brought up though:
>> # ip link set wlp5s0 up
>> RTNETLINK answers: Resource temporarily unavailable
> The kernel log doesn't really match what you're doing here.
>
> The error is EAGAIN (11). This is very likely due to a FW timeout
> which would be seen in the kernel log.
>
> The most common reason FW times out on QCA6174 hw3.2 is incorrect
> board file. The reason is the default board.bin doesn't work with
> hw3.2 and the board-2.bin doesn't include the proper mappings either
> yet (see the other thread in the archives - there's a lot of similar
> complaints).
>
>
>> I've tried various other firmwares (kvalo's, and other ones in the pull
>> requests for his repo), but they either give me a "found invalid board
>> magic" error or doesn't work any better than the one I got with the
> That's what you get when you rename files however you like. You
> probably wanted to use board.bin as board-2.bin file, right? This
> won't work.
>
>
>> linux-firmware package. I tried extracting the firmware myself from the
>> Windows drivers from Asus, which had both qca61x4_1_1_2.bin and
>> qca61x4_2_2.bin, using the instructions from [1]. The first failed with
>> "failed to receive control response completion, polling..", the second
>> worked as well as the one in linux-firmware.
> You encoded the binary incorrect probably.
>
> The problem you're facing isn't firmware problem per se. It is board
> file problem most likely.
>
>
>> The Asus driver also comes with a lot of eeprom-files, and I didn't know
>> which one to use. So I wrote a script that copied each one to
>> /lib/firmware/ath10k/QCA6174/hw3.0/board-2.bin and reloaded the driver, but
>> all of them failed with the invalid board magic error.
> Yada yada. board-2.bin is TLV formatted. The eeprom files are
> basically board.bin files (the API1 board files). You need to remove
> board-2.bin and use the eeprom files from windows driver as board.bin.
>
> You can actually figure out which one to use if you look at the .inf
> file in the windows driver. There's a section containing mappings for
> vendor/product ids (including subsystem ids, which is 1043:86cd in
> your case which can be seen in both ath10k print and lspci).
>
>
> Michał